Abstract
Rational Fog is an ambitious book that explores the relationship between science, war, and technology from the age of gunpowder through to drones and cyberwarfare in the twenty-first century with a focus on the West (particularly the United States). Informed by ‘feminist theory, science and technology studies, and ethnographic and sociological scholarship’ (p. 16), its central question is how some of the greatest minds of the last several centuries, and particularly from the 1940s onwards, have ended up devoting their efforts to the production of ever greater and more efficient ways of maiming and killing their fellow human beings in service of the state.
Given the wide range of topics that Lindee covers, which includes everything from the arquebus to nuclear weapons to Agent Orange, psychological warfare and ‘brainwashing’ along with the history of the institutional militarization of science and its changing relationship to the state, her coverage of any one particular subject cannot help but be somewhat shallow compared to the existing literature. The real test of this book, then, is the extent to which Lindee can leverage this eclectic array of case studies and methodologies to tell us something more profound about the underlying questions surrounding the relationship between warfare and science during this period. The results are somewhat uneven as she offers an intriguing but not fully developed argument about the relationship between war, weapons, and reason that sometimes raises more questions than it answers.
Lindee’s assertion that ‘Historical and social circumstances and problematics shape what scientists and engineers take for granted, what they assume, and what they place outside boundaries’ (p. 5) is sound but not particularly novel, at least within the field of Science and Technology Studies. Most historians of science would now readily concede that political structures shape both the construction and application of knowledge and that ‘Engagement with war has also changed science’ (p. 16). More novel but somewhat lacking in depth is Lindee’s engagement with the relationship between war, military technology, and rationality. ‘In the process of the rise of scientized warfare,’ she observes, ‘the forces of reason have often operated in a fog in which reason can produce unreasonable things’ (p. 224). She goes on to note that ‘Those challenging extremely powerful nations leverage science and technology to disrupt the very systems of reason, rationality, and order out of which science and technology developed’ (p. 224). Missing from this account, however, is any real interrogation of what is meant by ‘reason’ in the context of the West. Scholars such as Lisa Lowe have suggested that the very construction of Enlightenment rationality and science in the West took place in the context of a set of ideas that were rooted in violence and the exclusion of larger portions of the world’s population from the benefits of ‘civilization.’ Whether Lindee agrees with this interpretation or not, this work requires a more nuanced engagement with the context in which reason itself is constructed. If ‘reasonable’ and ‘rational’ scientists are continually producing horrific weapons one has to wonder whether that result is a feature or a bug, so to speak, of reason itself as culturally constructed in the West. While it does not necessarily live up to its lofty goals, Rational Fog is a solid introduction to some of the larger issues related to war and technology and is sure to provoke useful conversations on this topic.